January 25, 2008

Guest Blogger: Obey Your CPM

A cranky post from guest blogger Roger Lewis.

Here is an excerpt from AdAge's article on agencies of the year with an A grade or better.

"AKQA's work for Coca-Cola's Sprite grabbed attention with a campaign that invited consumers to participate in the marketing process through a national contest to create a theme song for TV spots featuring basketball star LeBron James. According to AKQA, the site received more than 250,000 visits with an average interaction time of 7 minutes, 24 seconds."

I don't know how much this cost to execute but lets say it was $ 250,000 (and I will bet I am way low). That would give a cost per thousand of $1,000. At $ 1,000,000 it is a cpm of $ 4,000.

I would also posit that they don't know if it was 250,000 unique visitors or one person 250,000 times. And I would also wonder if they knew how many of them were Sprite users before the promotion and how many bought Sprite after they played on the web site.

I do know that management is happy because they could measure it, but was it worth the cost? Did it create new users? Did it change behavior? Did sales go up? ( probably not possible to measure because 250,000 people would not have an impact on sales.)I am sure they can't answer the last few questions.

Its cold here in Florida, tomorrow is supposed to be warmer and I won't have time on my hands to read articles that upset me.

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."